Leftover non-survivors

[deoxy]

One thing that would be fun at the beginning of the game would be the first few days having a much higher (and rapidly falling) spawn rate for “survivors”, but make all the “extra” (not spawned by the current mechanics) be very low skill/equipment and not homing in on you to talk - these aren’t survivors, they’re just "not quite dead yet"ers - the zombies should generally make short work of them (if you’re lucky, maybe you can save a very few).

One of the things that makes starting in any kind of city location hard* (especially if you’re fairly deep in) is that you’re the only target around - if there were a few other people also trying to get out, it’s more likely that any one of you would make it, but most of them wouldn’t.

*The other is the nature of large spawn numbers just bumping what gets spawned into more evolved types - starting with a shocker brute IN THE ROOM WITH YOU, for instance, is pretty crazy.

Thoughts?

[kevin.granade]

Yea, it’d be interesting to start with a number of doomed survivors, maybe even packed into the starting shelter.
Good point about stray survivors acting as a distraction, making very early game easier. In particular there should be quite a lot of people who just board up their houses and dry to hide, with varying degrees of success.

[StopSignal]

Man, that’s an amazing idea.
I always wished for the first few days to be more chaotic- more crashed cars, spilled blood everywhere and broken windows with and houses that have been broken into or just left open in a hurry. Right now, it feels like quite a polite apocalypse, isn’t it?

[deoxy]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:13472”]Yea, it’d be interesting to start with a number of doomed survivors, maybe even packed into the starting shelter.
Good point about stray survivors acting as a distraction, making very early game easier. In particular there should be quite a lot of people who just board up their houses and dry to hide, with varying degrees of success.[/quote]

There should also be a decent number of people just trying to get somewhere, with little chance of success - gotta get home and find my family, gotta get to my spouse’s workplace, gotta get to the hospital to check on mom, etc. I would suggest the standard zombie loot drops as the only equipment they have - where do you think all the zombies came from?

The point being, unless it’s already been a few days (and your character is just magically spares all of that), there should still be people dying, at least for a day or two. After that, standard NPC spawn rate, to represent the hardened/lucky few.

[deoxy]

Any developments or other ideas on this?

I think the easiest way to handle this (extras at the beginning without affecting later spawn rate) would be to have most structures have a small chance to spawn with 1 (and a smaller chance to spawn with 2 or 3), but as I said, these would need to not have the “talk to me” mechanic enabled, and they would generally need to draw their gear from a fairly limited pool (generic zombie drops would probably be pretty good).

Also, the only structures what would have this chance would be those that spawn within a certain radius of your starting location and/or those that get created/loaded into memory the first time within a certain time period after game start. Any kind of “late” start scenario would not get any at all.

[kevin.granade]

No developments, this would be a pretty large set of changes. Personally I’m not too hyped about it at the moment since I’m just trying to get a release out.

[deoxy]

No developments, this would be a pretty large set of changes. Personally I’m not too hyped about it at the moment since I’m just trying to get a release out.

Fair enough - I do understand that significant chunks of the NPC stuff is hard-coded, so as much as I would like this, I completely agree that a new stable is a much better priority.

(Not that my opinion holds any sway here, of course. Heh.)

After the build, though… ?

[kevin.granade]

After the build, though… ?

All I can say for sure is it’s not on my list of priorities, the big feature I want to tackle post-release is still hordes 2.0.

[Azrad]

Would be nice though if you can make the NPCs station/guard a certain point, and have them do a specific action.

Like, construct stuff. Just spitballin’ here, and I have no knowledge of coding so I don’t even know if this makes sense.

Like, order an NPC (or several) to construct some stuff - like a line of walls. Provide the supplies needed, and the tools (and obviously the NPCs should have the appropriate level of skill for the job), and they’ll start work, the time it takes to do the job dependent on how much work they gotta do. I suppose part of the supplies needed is food and drink as well. Then just sit back and wait for them to finish. Like how an outpost gets new buildings as you do quests for them - but takes more time to finish.

[Miloch]

I’d say the rule of KISS would be best. Just add in some low powered NPCs with crap equipment early on who don’t go raider.

[deoxy]

I’d say the rule of KISS would be best. Just add in some low powered NPCs with crap equipment early on who don’t go raider.

Avoiding the “We need to talk” thing would pretty much be mandatory, or everyone would HATE it.

[Miloch]

I can agree with that.